Silence is a Sense by Layla AlAmmar
A thought-provoking novel about trying to be seen and heard in a new country after a traumatic escape from war.
THE PREMISE: In Layla Al Ammar’s new novel, Rana is a young Syrian refugee writing under the pseudonym “The Voiceless” for a British magazine. After arriving in the UK she has become mute and struggles to write her story—and those of other refugees—in her unnamed small English city apartment tower surrounded by stacks of books. As she ventures outside her apartment, she learns that “free countries” like the UK are often free in name only.
THE SETTING: In Damascus, Rana and her friends live in bright apartments full of hope, as they watch the Egypt Spring unfold on TV and wonder if their Syria would be next. But it’s in the drab apartment blocks in England that Rana looks back at her promising college career and the many kilometers she walked and rode overland hidden in a frigid fruit truck to what she thought would be safety in the UK. She finds joy in the way the English rain transforms her new city: “Buildings going dark and streaky, cobblestones overflowing with bright moss and squishy with mulch, the park grass glistening and wet and dotted with muddy puddles.” Silent, she befriends a used bookshop owner who gifts her unlimited numbers of tattered books to devour in her sparse apartment. Her laptop is her only connection to the outside world, apart from the neighbors she gets to know in the surrounding apartment towers. She can see clearly into their units and learns about them from hearing their screams and cries, seeing their many love interests come and go, and in her own building inhaling the fragrance of curry powder, garlic, onions, and turmeric in the hall. She also spends time at Maqbool, a grocery run by a Pakistani man named Hasan. She calls it a “full-fat shop,” full of oils, ghee, sticky baklava, and dates filled with nuts. Hasan’s shop is next to the mosque, run by a progressive imam who hopes to show the larger community that Muslims are just like everyone else. Even in the supposedly-peaceful UK, that lesson is hard to teach, as Hasan, Rana, and others come to find through terrorism in the guise of white supremacy.
IN THE END: Perhaps the thing I loved most about this book is that Layla AlAmmar relates Rana’s trauma with other groups who have become scapegoats, whether it’s Black Americans, LGBTQ, Latinx, Asian Americans, or Jews. In the same light, one of my favorite lines from the book is something to keep in mind: “A patriot is one who loves, a nationalist is one who hates.” This is Rana’s story and her lesson for us.
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